Agreed. This and (sane) access to multi-threading. I want to be able to write a Rust application, compile to wasm and load it with

    <html>
    <body>
        <div id="root"></div>
        <script type="application/wasm" src="./main.wasm"></script>
    </body>
    </html>

Would be great for high performance web applications and for contexts like browser extensions where the memory usage and performance drain is real when multiplied over n open tabs. I'm not sure how code splitting would work in the wasm world, however.

v8 could be optimized to reduce its memory footprint if it detects that no JavaScript is running - or wasm-only applications could use an engine like wasmer and bypass v8 entirely.

Another factor is that web technologies are used to write desktop applications via Electron/similar. This is probably because desktop APIs are terrible and not portable. First class wasm support in the web would translate to more efficient desktop applications (Slack, VSCode, Discord, etc) and perhaps less hate towards memory heavy electron applications.